Here's Why the 2002 Ford Thunderbird Was a Retro Failure

this is a 2004 Ford Thunderbird and it was a bit of a disappointment okay it was a lot of a disappointment this era of Thunderbird came out back in 2002 and when it was released it was hailed as the revival of the iconic Thunderbird brand name and it had an enthusiastic reception from car enthusiasts and the regular public alike but that warm welcome did not stick around and today I'm going to explain why I've borrowed this Thunderbird from motor cars of the main line which is an independent car dealership here in the Philadelphia area that has everything a wonderfully varied inventory from 1980s Cadillacs to land rovers to BMWs there is always something or many things I get excited about when I visit motor cars of the main line so let's talk Thunderbird like I said this car came out back in 2002 and it was the eleventh generation of the Thunderbird which first came out in 1955 it was also the revival of the Thunderbird named because over the years the Thunderbird had gotten kind of crappy until it was simply canceled in the 1990s everyone was really excited about this car when it debuted back in 2002 and Motor Trend named it the 2002 car of the year but here's the thing back in 2001 motor trends Car of the Year was the Chrysler PT Cruiser so they don't always get these things right and they certainly didn't get it right with the Thunderbird yes it debuted to a lot of fanfare back in 2002 but sales started dropping off fast once the initial funder Birds were sold and once people started to realize that it was really just a two-door version of the Lincoln LS sedan with a mediocre interior and a price tag that was far too high by 2005 the starting price of this car was just under forty thousand dollars which is around fifty two thousand dollars in today's money and it didn't help that or only gave the Thunderbird one engine a relatively dull 3.9 liter v8 that maxed out at only 280 horsepower meaning it wasn't really very sporty at all but that wasn't the only problem and today I'm going to show you the rest first I'm going to take you on a tour of the Thunderbird and show you all of its interesting quirks and features then I'm gonna get it out on the road and drive it and then I'm going to give it a dug score and from one of my thoughts on the Thunderbird click the link below to visit autotrader.com slash oversteer where I've also rounded up a list of some other cheap retro cars you can get that are currently listed for sale on auto trader all right I'm going to start the quirks and features of the Thunderbird with one of its biggest drawbacks which was its interior quality and get in here and the first thing you notice is it just really isn't all that nice do you look around you see a lot of cheap plastic a lot of reused forward switches and buttons and not all that much in the interior this car that helps justify its price tag which again is equivalent to around fifty two thousand dollars in today's money it's just a lot of cheap not so great looking stuff in here the center console is a great example it looks like it's leather but when you tap it it's actually just cheap plastic like basically everything else in this car's interior and really the cheapness is carried over to basically every piece of this car - the air vents - the odometer in the gauge cluster which just looks like it should be in a commercial van and not a somewhat expensive luxury convertible everything just looks cheap and not all that nice with that said I have to give them credit for spending some money in a few places for instance the panel that the heated seat buttons are on is gray and not black like everything else in the center control stack why is that no idea but it's gray another interesting item if you put a child in the passenger seat you might want to turn off the passenger airbag so it doesn't cause injuries to the child if you get into an accident now a lot of cars hide the switch to turn on and off the airbag in the glove box but Ford's stuck it right in the center control stack and it's a keyhole so there is kind of an ugly little on/off keyhole in the middle of the center control stack interesting and speaking of keyholes over on the driver's door panel if you want to open the trunk you don't have some regular button like normal cars do instead you have an unlabeled silver keyhole if you press that the trunk pops open if you stick your ignition key in that and turn it then that button is locked and then valets won't have access to your trunk I guess when you give them your car that is the trunk button nice and classy another rather interesting decision this time on the passenger door panel you can see the power window button and the power/lock button are right next to each other and they are the exact same size and shape meaning you can't just put down the windows or lock the doors you have to actually look at them and see which one it is you're touching before you do anything or else you might do the wrong thing good thinking Ford with that said I have to admit I do like the general look of the door panel in this car I like this silver piece of trim in the middle I like these black lines on the side I think it actually looks like a pretty cool retro looking door panel and I think it has a nice look to it and next up we move on to some of the Thunderbirds other interesting interior quirks and features starting with the center console storage area which is unusually small the parking brake takes up way too much space in this center console and so the little storage area is in fact little mixed up how about a really unusual thing with the light controls you go over to the switch that turns on the lights and you have your typical three options on/off or parking lights but you also have an option for auto that's pretty standard but then in this car once you turn it to auto you can then turn it as like a little dial that changes like the amount of auto I think this allows you to change the auto light sensitivity like how dark does it have to be for the headlights to come on automatically but I have never seen that before a very unusual idea for an otherwise normal headlight dial next up another interesting quirk of the Thunderbird how about the fact that it has power seats but only for the seat bottom to move it backwards and forwards if you want to move the seat back that is a manual lever that is some serious cost-cutting right there now we only have to give them half power seats that's all we can afford and speaking of seats if we're gonna talk seating we got to talk about another one of this cars biggest flaws and that would be the seating situation in here this vehicle has only two seats behind the front seats you can see there's a little carpeted storage area where you can stick stuff there are a couple of speakers and there's this panel with the Thunderbird logo on it there are no rear seats in the Thunderbird now this is kind of a shame because this is a rather huge vehicle the Thunderbird was based on the Lincoln LS luxury sedan and the Jaguar s-type and the Thunderbirds overall length was about the same as a Ford Explorer SUV from this era and yet this thing only has two seats I think that was a retro decision the old Thunderbirds only had two seats so you couldn't give this one four but it really limits the practicality and it's not like this car really benefits from that decision in terms of sportiness because it's not like removing the two seats made this car small enough to throw around on a curvy road and frankly it didn't really have the engine power to do that anyway so you lost two seats and you didn't really gain anything you know next step I want to talk about the Thunderbirds roof situation now this car has a power convertible soft top which I will show you in a minute but the Thunderbirds also came with a removable hardtop the hardtop was interesting it was color matched to the color of your Thunderbird but the most interesting part was it had porthole windows you can see them here and have these little circular porthole windows it was meant to mimic the same window design in the original old-school Thunderbirds and I always thought it was a really cool touch in this car one of the few really cool touches in this car I always really liked it now meet removable hardtop is rather big and unwieldy as removable hard tops tend to be in convertible cars required multiple people in order to take it off or put it on but it was there if you wanted to operate your Thunderbird in hardtop mode but anyway let's go back to that power convertible top for a second I'm going to show you how it works and it has a rather interesting operation in part because the very first thing that you have to do in order to operate it is you have to push down on these little screws at the top of the windshield one on the driver's side one on the passenger side I guess so then it's ready to receive the power top but anyway once you've pushed down on those screws there is a little button in the center control stack for the convertible top you push it and the process begins now interestingly once the roof is in this position it looks like it's done but it isn't instead there's a little latch that you have to pull inside the middle on the convertible top and that will unlatch and then fully and completely latch the top with the windshield and then it's in place and now the convertible top is up now if you want to put the top down obviously you got to go back to that Center latch you unlatch it from the windshield then you press the button again and then it all goes back down the other direction and now the top is down for you to enjoy some open-air motoring in your Thunderbird now next we move on to some interesting exterior quirks and features with the Thunderbird and one of them is the fact that the trunk space is really not very good and you can tell that the moment you look at the car from this angle you see the power top does not share the trunk with the cargo and as a result that pushes the trunk back then you can see that the rear this car has kind of sloped back to give it this cool stylish look which it does look cool back here but then the problem is when you open up the trunk you can see it is incredibly shallow it's wide enough but you can barely even get a backpack in here let alone real luggage it is just not all that much trunk space again considering the relatively massive size of this car it's a decision they made for styles sake and next up another interesting style decision with the Thunderbird and one that I happen to really like is the trim around the windshield it's a little harder to tell with this silver car but all the Thunderbirds had chrome trim around the windshield which really sets the windshield apart from the body of the car and gives it a cool look the windshield is also raked pretty far back compared to a normal windshield which kind of gives it that laid-back cool convertible vibe and next up moving on to lighting and the headlights and taillights of this car have a surprisingly similar design to them you can see the headlights are up here they're split in half the upper part is the actual headlight the lower part is the turn signal in back same deal it's a circle and once again it's split in two the upper part is the turn signal and the brake light and the lower part is the reverse light I've always felt that the headlights and taillights look fairly good with this car or at least very much right at home with the rest of the thunderbirds design and next up we move under the hood in the Thunderbird and you can see it's engine 3.9 liter v8 again this was another one of the big drawbacks of this car they gave the funner bird of v8 but not a very healthy one the first model year it had only 250 horsepower the next year they bump that up to 280 but again it just wasn't really all that much power even back then there were some V sixes getting those power numbers now there was talk of adding more power to the Thunderbird a larger engine or maybe a supercharger but it never really sold well enough to justify the development of a more powerful version and it just never happened there was also talk about making a Lincoln version of the Thunderbird and they went so far as to create a pretty well done concept car called the Mark X or Mark 10 concept which was just sort of a Thunderbird with different styling from Lincoln in the front in the back and a much nicer interior that also would have been pretty cool but again the Thunderbird sales just didn't justify a more expensive more luxurious Lincoln version so they never did that either and finally we move on to the owner's manual and the owners manual of this car is unusual because it is probably the most cost cut owner's manual I have ever seen first off take a look at the cover it's just a black and white cover that says Thunderbird on it they didn't even bother with color and then when you open it up it never says Thunderbird anywhere throughout this entire owners manual everything was just copied and pasted from other Ford owner's manuals and they only put in Thunderbird specific stuff when they absolutely had to it was really the cheapest thing they could think of the owner's manual is so basic that when you go to the introduction most cars it says congratulations on your purchase of a new Thunderbird in this car the first thing you see from the introduction is California's Proposition 65 warning telling you that this car contains substances that may give you cancer that's how they start the owner's manual in this thing they just weren't really given it all they had and so those are the courts and features of the Ford Thunderbird now it's time to get this thing out on the road and see how it drives alright driving the Thunderbird I'm sorry I have to have the windows up for sound it looks stupid to me the biggest problem with this car was not really the engine power or the two seats or the price tag those were all contributors but the biggest problem was the fact that when the Thunderbird came out back in 55 it was one of the coolest cars in the world it's hard to imagine now that Ford was making one of the coolest cars in world but I mean it cooler than anything that I need European companies are me it was just so cool and Ford had the opportunity to revive the name and do that again and instead what they did was create a retro car that appealed to people who remembered back when it was cool and so it's just you know the the primary clientele for this car was 70 year old men and women who you know thought back to their first dates in a Thunderbird and when that's your clientele you're only gonna sell a fixed number and young people are gonna stay away because they don't want to drive what grandma's driving and that's what happened so Ford found 60,000 people over four years who fit that group they bought them all and then that was it and that was the whole revival of the Thunderbird and it's just kind of a shame that it came and went so quickly when there was an opportunity for more as you drive the car one thing you quickly find is that the windshield steep rake really does almost affect you I mean you can see where the Sun Visor is mounted it really comes back pretty far close to my head and if you're tall to get an accident I would kind of worry about that pushing me back it really is not all that high up there now the car drives about how you would expect it to even though the engine is only given out 280 horsepower it does feel a little bit more muscular than I was thinking it would probably because of that pretty big torque figure 286 and also steering isn't so bad it's relatively floaty and it doesn't respond to quick inputs very quickly but it does the job it's just not all that sporty this very much was a car designed to be like a relaxed cruiser type of vehicle certainly priced in the relaxed Cruiser type of price point this really wasn't that terrible of a car but I do think it fell short of its potential I always liked how it looked I think they did a great job kind of modernizing the old-school t-bird design but the car was just too soft automatic only not all that much power floaty you know the two seats why it was so big it just it just could have been better it was certainly better than the last few generations of the Thunderbird but it definitely didn't bring back that cool aspect of the 1950s I remember that as a kid when this came out I was 14 and I was excited I mean I had known the Thunderbird kind of become worse and worse over time the last gen Thunderbird was just really not all that good especially the last few model years they were all rental cars and this came out it was like well here's something amazing this could be so cool and then you know grandma's bottom and we started reading magazine tests that they're floating that they're not really all that tight you know there's a lot of cowl shake and it was like well okay the problem with the Thunderbird really is that the t-bird came out in 55 the Mustang came out in 64 and by 2019 the Mustang kind of occupies the position where one might think you could put the Thunderbird and so that doesn't give him a lot of room if you come out with a Thunderbird you can't compete with the Mustang you have to do something different so this is what they did and it was different and they found the buyers but just wasn't all that exciting truth be told I think they did a good job with this car for the people who bought it for the 70 plus crowd who always wanted a Thunderbird well now here it is again it's not that bad I think those people probably didn't really mind the interior quality they got what they wanted a cool stylish car the Thunderbirds back all that stuff it just never it never really did I think what it what it could have and so that's the 2004 Ford Thunderbird this wasn't an awful car but it wasn't as good as it could have been which is a shame and it's really surprising that Ford did such a mediocre job of reviving the Thunderbird and such an amazing job of reviving the Ford GT within the same few years this was intended to be sort of the unforgettable rebirth of the Thunderbird but instead it's largely forgotten and in the 15 years since this car has gone off the market Ford hasn't said a thing about trying to bring it back again which is probably a good thing anyway with that it is time to give the Thunderbird a Doug score starting with the weekend categories and styling the Thunderbird looks good and I think that was one of the high points of this car and it gets a six out of ten acceleration to zero to 60 around 6.5 seconds which gives it a 3 out of 10 handling his average too floaty for a two-seat rear-wheel drive v8 car and it gets a 4 out of 10 fun factor is only okay there's some enjoyment in piloting this thing more than I expected but it's hardly a thrill and it gets a 4 out of 10 cool factor is low these are very cool to some but specifically uncool to many others and it gets a 3 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 20 out of 50 next up are the daily categories and features and the Thunderbird is okay but not especially great particularly when you consider the price point and it gets a three out of ten comfort is good it's a nice relaxed Cruiser and it gets a six out of ten quality is a mixed bag it's reasonably reliable but the interior isn't nice enough given the original price point and it gets a 5 out of 10 practicality is OK normal for a car like this although given its size you'd assume it would have more cargo or passenger space it gets a 3 out of 10 finally value and it's shocking how much these still cost I figured they'd be like $4,000 by now but they can be like 15 or 20 which is too high for what this offers it gets a 5 out of 10 for a total daily score of 22 out of 50 add it up in the Doug score is 42 out of 100 I have no idea what to compare this car to is I've never reviewed anything like it but these are the closest cars I could think of overall has the same Doug score as the Lincoln Towncar the t-bird has eight more weekend points in the Town Car has eight more daily points and I think that's totally appropriate because they're very similar but the town car is the daily driver version and the Thunderbird is the weekend car assuming of course that you're 70 years old you [Music]

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 1,449,187

Rating: 4.7357717 out of 5

Keywords: ford thunderbird, thunderbird review, ford thunderbird review, 2002 thunderbird, retro thunderbird, new thunderbird, ford t-bird, t-bird review, 2002 t-bird, t-bird, thunderbird, 2005 thunderbird, ford thunderbird retro, doug demuro, demuro, doug de muro

Id: luD_Lp4vjAg

Length: 20min 27sec (1227 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

pleeease review the Renault Clio V6

[u/ThirteenMatt]

I'm really skeptical about all the comments on the low output. I really doubt those were low numbers for the time, for example the Mustang GT had 260hp up to 2004 and 300 from 2005 and it was considered a sports car.

All in all it seems most critics were on the fact the car was a bad sportscar when I feel it was never intended to be one.